Today Oracle released its latest version of Solaris technology, the Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 release. It includes a large number of new features not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified. The release is available under a variety of licenses including a supported commercial license on a wide variety of x86 and SPARC platforms.

This version can be used for EVALUATION and/or DEVELOPMENT. There is no time limit specified for evaluation nor development. You could evaluate and develop some shell scripts for say, 5 years. As long as you dont violate the license you are free.

Basically, Oracle executives say that you can use it at home. But if you use it in production you need to pay. You can buy support and patches for Solaris 11 Express.

Regarding Linux, well, for instance, RedHat6 is more expensive than Solaris 11. I trust more on an mature Enterprise Unix such as Solaris, than Linux. I would rather pay support for Solaris 11 than RedHat.

I trust more on an mature Enterprise Unix such as Solaris, than Linux. I would rather pay support for Solaris 11 than RedHat.

That's absolutely fabulous for you, but unfortunately there are a sizeable and significant number of people over the past ten years who don't and haven't agreed with you. Sun wheeled out the 'mature enterprise Unix' line many times and it didn't make any difference. That's why it's Oracle having a go now and not Sun.

"I trust more on an mature Enterprise Unix such as Solaris, than Linux. I would rather pay support for Solaris 11 than RedHat.

That's absolutely fabulous for you, but unfortunately there are a sizeable and significant number of people over the past ten years who don't and haven't agreed with you. Sun wheeled out the 'mature enterprise Unix' line many times and it didn't make any difference. That's why it's Oracle having a go now and not Sun. "
That is dumb argumentation you are using.

You are implying that Linux is better than Solaris, because more people are using Linux. Well, I guess you have just proved that Windows is better than Linux - because more people are using Windows.

Regarding Linux vs Solaris. Every serious sysadmin knows that Linux have severe problems with stability, scalability and what not. You want to see some links?

"Citing an internal INTEL corp study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. "Is this a problem?" he asked.

http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/
"I used to think [code quality] was in decline, and I think that I might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix.
...
it would help if people's patches were less buggy."

"Go mkfs a 500 TB ext-3/4 or other Linux file system, fill it up with multiple streams of data, add/remove files for a few months with, say, 20 GB/sec of bandwidth from a single large SMP server and crash the system and fsck it and tell me how long it takes. Does the I/O performance stay consistent during that few months of adding and removing files? Does the file system perform well with 1 million files in a single directory and 100 million files in the file system?

My guess is the exercise would prove my point: Linux file systems have scaling issues that need to be addressed before 100 TB environments become commonplace. Addressing them now without rancor just might make Linux everything its proponents have hoped for."

Linux has scaling problems. Sure, Linux runs on super computers on Top500 (which are just a fast network with a bunch of PCs) or on a 1024 core machine from SGI Altix (which is just some blades on a fast switch) - but that is not the same thing as a running a large machine. Linux always runs on networks. Not on a single large computer.

This version can be used for EVALUATION and/or DEVELOPMENT. There is no time limit specified for evaluation nor development. You could evaluate and develop some shell scripts for say, 5 years. As long as you dont violate the license you are free.

Basically, Oracle executives say that you can use it at home. But if you use it in production you need to pay. You can buy support and patches for Solaris 11 Express.

Regarding Linux, well, for instance, RedHat6 is more expensive than Solaris 11. I trust more on an mature Enterprise Unix such as Solaris, than Linux. I would rather pay support for Solaris 11 than RedHat.

"If it has to run, it runs on Solaris"

Actually you can install into production as well.

#11 of the faq says:

Licensing and Support for Oracle Solaris 11 Express

11-Can I get support for Oracle Solaris 11 Express?

Yes. Oracle Solaris 11 Express is covered under the Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems or Oracle Premier Support for Systems support option for Oracle hardware, and Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for non-Oracle hardware. Customers must choose either of these support options should they wish to deploy Oracle Solaris 11 Express into a production environment.